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Sunday, November 20, 2011
There are terrible moments of silence in Theresa Rebeck's new Broadway play.
No, not to worry: None of the actors has forgotten a line or flubbed a cue while performing in the wonderful new comedy "Seminar," which had its world premiere on Sunday. Those pauses are just the moments where everyone in the Golden Theatre is frozen, staring at Alan Rickman.
The former "Harry Potter" professor plays a crass, pugnacious novelist-turned-tutor to a group of four budding writers. Each week, he unhappily examines their offerings — pages from fledgling stories on which they've poured their souls — with a casual flip. His students cower as he reads, awaiting the verdict.
It's usually bad. He's likely to lacerate them with remarks such as, "It's perfect, in a kind of whorish way." To another, he says, "There's no subject or story or idea or meaning." Or, to another in disgust: "I'm not even making it through your first sentence."
Gulp.
This economic play — clocking in at 100 minutes with no intermission — still manages to say a lot about the pain and costs of creating art. It is funny, witty and painfully aware — easily one of Rebeck's best works. Director Sam Gold has drilled home the truth of her words and added a little frisky sexiness. An excellent cast of five — Rickman is joined by Lily Rabe, Hamish Linklater, Jerry O'Connell and Hettienne Park — give Rebeck's words a believable three-dimensional life.
It hits Broadway in a season when two other plays have
explored the idea of writers making a mess of their lives for their art — "The Submission" at MCC Theater about a playwright who fakes his identity to get published, and "Other Desert Cities" now on Broadway about a novelist whose strident memoir about her dead brother turns out to have some rather large holes. Weirdly, both have echoes here.
Playwrights writing about writing might seem a bit navel-gazing, but not in Rebeck's hands. Making her return to Broadway since 2007's "Mauritius," she offers a frank appraisal of the soul-torturing world of authors. "Writers in their natural state are about as civilized as feral cats," she writes in one of several zingers.
The play opens in the snazzy Upper West Side apartment — David Zinn's set emphasizes chic Scandinavian furniture lines, modern art and expensive wood — of Kate (Rabe), a writer with a Jane Austen obsession and an obsession with a short story on which she has been working for six long years.
She's hosting a private seminar in which she and three others have paid $5,000 each to be taught by Leonard (Rickman), a one-time writer and editor who promises them guidance. Also attending as students are the talented but insecure Martin (Linklater), the average but name-dropping writer Douglas (O'Connell) and the sex pot intellectual Izzy (Park).
Seeking Leonard's favor, the four students naturally turn on each other. The seminar becomes a hothouse of insecurities, where one student's success is considered another's failure and where a comment like "it had some nice things in it" is damning indeed. Sexual frustrations bubble about as these feral cats seek relief from the pressure.
Leonard's unwillingness to sugarcoat anything puts the seminar at risk of imploding, but Rebeck takes us to his paper-strewn apartment for a neat final scene that shows us who this broken writer really is.
Rickman is clearly very good at playing arrogant and sneering, but he shows a touchingly vulnerable side while also delivering a lacerating monologue about what the publishing industry does to young talent and how words can really hurt. Rabe has a coltish immaturity that ages into weary pride by the end, and Linklater is excellent as the nerdy — but needy — wannabe intellectual who is really just a boy.
Who turns out to be the best writer of the bunch? That's easy
— Theresa Rebeck.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/11/20/entertainment/e165457S62.DTL#ixzz1eJ05CL2N
Sunday, November 20, 2011
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